News Flash: Onion publishes fake news about faked lunar landing

Back in August, Neil Armstrong admitted at a press conference that the lunar landing was an elaborate fabrication engineered by the government. He believed the entire event was created in a soundstage in New Mexico, that wind from an air duct made the flag ripple and those moon rocks seen in the original footage came from the NASA prop department. [Tip to TechCrunch]

Armstrong said:

“It only took a few hastily written paragraphs published by this passionate denier of mankind’s so-called ‘greatest technological achievement’ for me to realize I had been living a lie. It has become painfully clear to me that on July 20, 1969, the Lunar Module under the control of my crew did not in fact travel 250,000 miles over eight days, touch down on the moon, and perform various experiments, ushering in a new era for humanity.”

This jaw-dropping confession, brought to you by the purveyor of fake news The Onion, reverberated across the Internet and caught the attention of two legitimate Bangladeshi newspapers. The Daily Manab Zamin and the New Nation picked up the story and ran with it. The Daily Manab Zamin attributed the Armstrong shocker to the “Onion News Network, Lebanon, Ohio.”

Well, you can imagine those editors slinking into their seats, hearing Southwest’s “Wanna Get Away” commercial when they discovered the piece about the hoax was a hoax. Hasanuzzuman Khan, an editor for New Nation, and the Daily Manab Samin apologized for not checking facts. “We didn’t know the Onion was not a real news site,” Khan told Agence France-Presse, which, by the way, is a real news outlet.